Important changes are landing for the office suite

Feb 29, 2016 06:59 GMT  ·  By

The LibreOffice developers are making some changes, and they are introducing GTK3 native menus for the office suite.

It's safe to say that LibreOffice is the most used office suite on the Linux platform, and that means that it should be full GTK3 compatible, but that's not the case. Developers are only now making some changes that would make office suite much better looking in most Linux operating systems.

That doesn't mean that it has big problems right now, just that it could be better if the context menus and the menubar were GTK3 compatible, and that is exactly what happens right now. The changes are being implemented in a gradual way, so don't expect everything to change at once.

What about Qt?

It turns out that LibreOffice looks a little bit better when running in a Qt-powered environment. The fact that the office suite is only now becoming a little bit more GTK+ friendly seems to indicate that they are a little late to the party.

With a few notable exceptions, like GNOME, for example, it looks like many of the Linux ecosystems are moving towards Qt. Even so, the work of the LibreOffice developers is welcomed.

"Following quickly on native gtk3 popup context menus is implementation of native gtk3 menubar and menus. For comparison here's the (not utterly awful) emulated look prior to this. You can compare the spacing of elements in the menubar, menu separator rendering, distance of checkmarks to the following text, the display of the shortcuts in different font attributes with different positioning, and menu entry line spacing," wrote developer Caolán McNamara.

The differences are not shattering, but they are there for the users with a more critical eye. There is no indication of when this change will be made available, but it will probably be in the 5.1 branch of the office suite if we're lucky.